The Boko Haram Death Toll

The aftermath of a deadly terrorist bombing suspected to have been carried out Boko Haram last year in Nigeria’s capital.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AFOLABI SOTUNDE/REUTERS

News came from northeast Nigeria on January 3rd that the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram had attacked Baga, a fishing town of ten thousand people on the shores of Lake Chad that has been raided by the militants before. The group seized a military base and, according to early reports, murdered hundreds of people. Houses, shops, and other buildings burned, and bodies were left to rot in the streets as the survivors fled any way they could: walking to other towns and villages, or boating across the lake into neighboring Chad. Some hid in the bushes. At first, the massacre received little of the world’s attention. Over the past six months, Boko Haram has taken control of more than two dozen towns in northeast Nigeria, most of them in Borno State, and launched attacks into Chad and Cameroon. Their territory now nearly equals the Islamic State’s in Iraq and Syria. This latest attack looked like more of the same. Then reports began to emerge that Boko Haram had killed as many as two thousand people in at least sixteen towns and villages in the last week.

This weekend, Baga remained difficult to access, and extremely dangerous. Kashim Shettima, the governor of Borno State, who has tried to visit most of the communities hit by Boko Haram, and who ventured to Chibok, the site of the schoolgirl kidnapping, when President Goodluck Jonathan would not, has not been able to get to Baga. Today I spoke to Hamza Idris, a friend and senior reporter with the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust, who has been covering the Baga massacre for the past week from the Borno State capital of Maiduguri. He had spoken with Baga residents and a district head who said that they had seen hundreds, but not as many as a thousand, bodies: people who were breathing and eating one moment and dead the next, from a grenade or bullet. Surviving families have been fractured as they seek refuge elsewhere in Nigeria and beyond its borders. One of the last times Boko Haram attacked Baga, in April, 2013, as many as two hundred people died, although most of those deaths came when the Nigerian military burned the town.

The relationship between Nigeria and the United States, its most important partner in fighting Boko Haram, has been compromised by increasing mistrust. But there is little that outsiders can do in this war. The sad fact is that Boko Haram could have been defeated by now, by a more competent and more determined Nigerian government. This will be of no solace to those who reside in what was once northeastern Nigeria, and now has become something different. I asked Idris if he knew what was happening in Baga. He sounded defeated: “They’ve taken over the town, so we don’t know if they’ve stopped the killing or not.”